Cuba Politics News

UN Human Rights committee appoints Cuban as Chairman

A key United Nations human rights body on Monday appointed as its chairman for the next three years a Cuban law professor who has been a senior diplomat for the Havana government and spokesman for its foreign ministry.

The 73-year-old Miguel Alfonso Martinez, currently acting president of the Cuban Society for International Law, was elected to preside over its deliberations by the new 18-member Advisory Committee to the UN’s Human Rights Council.

Chosen as one of his two vice-presidents was a Russian law expert, Vladimir Kartashkin, who served in the foreign ministry of the former Soviet Union in the 1970s and for many years worked in the UN Secretariat in New York.

The other vice-president chosen by the Committee—which replaces the former UN sub-commission on the protection of human rights, was Egyptian company lawyer and campaigner for women’s rights Monar Zulfikar.

Members of the committee—which provides expertise to the 47-nation Council—are nominated by their governments but are expected to work independently and to take decisions without reference to the authorities of their home country.

The Council itself was set up two years ago to replace the UN’s discredited old Human Rights Commission.

But critics say the Council has also become a battleground between blocs of countries in which Islamic nations—usually supported by Russia, China and Cuba—scrap with Western countries over competing visions of human rights.

From a hopeful start in 1945, the UN has since declined into nothing more than a Dictators’ Club. One definition of democracy is the ability of the electorate of a nation to change its government. Membership in the UN should be restricted to those nations who so qualify.

The UN has shown time and time again that it’s toothless waste of time. What’s needed in this day and age is proper representation of all of the countries of the world.

Every representative should have to pass agreed criteria such as human rights issues and should also meet certain criteria in relation to fairly constructed forms of goverment whether socialist or capitalist. Once this collective of countries has been formed, and every country should have a chance to be part of a proper UNITED NATIONS, then they should have the power to do whatever necessary.

At present and throughout history the world has been at war with itself. This simply cannot go on.

It seems to me that there is significant inertia towards blocking the U.S. hegemony in the U.N. This is a big problem; the US can and has been blocked on measures from Darfur to East Asia. It seems to me that instead of one all-encompassing Dictaror’s Club, it’s the US and its dwindling international support vs. everybody else. The populations of these dicatorships are the victims because the elite in their countries take advantage of antipathy towards the U.S. and exploit it so that they can stay in charge. This is not the way it should be. The US needs to totally re-examine its foreign policy and come up with a strategy that will bring these countries into the fold instead of alienating and uniting all the 3rd world against us.